


Not To Praise, But To Bury

by bigmoneygator



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Loss, M/M, One Shot, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-09
Updated: 2013-10-09
Packaged: 2017-12-28 22:31:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/997681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bigmoneygator/pseuds/bigmoneygator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Raleigh shouldn't have done it, shouldn't have found Chuck's bunk and pounded on the door, shouldn't have smashed their mouths together before Chuck could start snapping off insults. When Raleigh kicked the door shut, the dull thud it made was like a contract being sealed. </i>
</p>
<p>A small one-shot on the short-lived tragic romance of Chuck Hansen & Raleigh Becket.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not To Praise, But To Bury

**Author's Note:**

> It's my headcanon that Raleigh is totally bonkers over Shakespeare, especially the histories, and no one can convince me differently. I usually like writing in an AU where Chuck lives, but I decided to sort of explore the shittier parts of the canon storyline. It might be a little messy but I banged it out in, like, a second. 
> 
> [For those curious, there are still a lot of drabbles coming from my "You Are A Runner" 'verse. I'm in the process of cleaning them up.]

It rips open old wounds, things that Raleigh had thought were healed over ages ago, when Chuck doesn't come back from Pitfall. There used to be a ragged, aching place in his chest, a hollow in his gut; some cavern inside him left over from where Yancy used to be. Liquor stopped the edges from feeling so raw, like the only thing that could cauterize a wound so big was the biting sting of rotgut whiskey. 

It had only just started feeling like the hole was filled in, the edges drawn together, when he got dragged back onto the 'Dome, back into the mess, tossed into a pit where the serpents of his loss coiled to sleep. Mako dulls the ache, soothes the sting. It was something about her quiet calm, her steadfast demeanor. Pentecost called himself a fixed point, but Mako was Raleigh's fixed point from the minute he set foot in Hong Kong.

Yancy used to read Shakespeare to Raleigh to get him to go to sleep, and his love of the Bard has stuck with him through the lean times. In their first Drift, Mako hears Raleigh thinking in lines from Julius Caesar. She hears him sing her praises in the same words that Caesar described himself.

_You are as constant as the North Star_ , he thinks. 

Raleigh could feel the little wash of joy radiate out of her, touch those angry, scorched corners of himself. Before she chased the rabbit, he would have been happy to feed her platitudes in iambic pentameter for days.

But it's Chuck, cocky, nasty, smug little shit that he is, that drowns out the ache in Raleigh's chest completely. When they have their little power struggle, words laced with poison and fists flying, that Raleigh notices a look on Chuck's face. It's the kind of look that no twenty-one year old would have on his face unless he was thinking about taking someone apart. The sum of the meaning is in the details: the challenge shining in his eyes, the arrogant set of his jaw, the cocksure lilt of his head. Twenty-one year old boys don't have that look unless they want to fuck something.

Raleigh shouldn't have done it, shouldn't have found Chuck's bunk and pounded on the door, shouldn't have smashed their mouths together before Chuck could start snapping off insults. When Raleigh kicked the door shut, the dull thud it made was like a contract being sealed. 

Chuck fucks like he fights; brutal and messy and inelegant. He doesn't give one inch of quarter. Raleigh admits to himself that it's what he wanted; Chuck Hansen completely naked, sitting on Raleigh's cock, hands fisted in each other's hair. Chuck pants in his ear, nipping occasionally at his collarbone, coaxing noises out of Raleigh's throat that he was unaware he could make. Chuck's in charge here, and he knows it.

Raleigh's never been one to chase tail for fixing his problems, instead choosing to curl up at the bottom of a bottle for comfort. With his fingers digging into Chuck's hips, teeth gritted while Chuck whispers horrendously dirty things into his mouth, Raleigh thinks that maybe he had gotten the wrong idea. His mind is nearly totally blank, completely engulfed by this force of nature contained in human skin. He forgets, just for a little while, about the empty space where Yancy used to be. 

Chuck comes all over Raleigh's sweater and it doesn't even matter to him. He feels like he might have blacked out for a few seconds with the force of his own orgasm, colors bursting and flaring to life in his hindbrain, painting the insides of his skull with a mess of hormones and chemicals.

"Shit," Raleigh grunts through gritted teeth.

"Your sweater's fucked, mate," Chuck says, sliding off of Raleigh's lap. 

Raleigh takes it off and balls it up to throw at Chuck's head. "Better give me something to walk back to my room in, then."

"Bit obvious we copped a root if you walk out in my clothes, don't you think?" Chuck sneers, wrapping a towel around his waist.

"Bit more obvious if I walk out with a ruined sweater." 

Chuck cracks a ghost of a grin. He grabs a PPDC issue grey shirt off the edge of his bed and drops it into Raleigh's lap. Raleigh adjusts himself, zips his pants back up. Chuck watches him, that arrogant expression still on his face.

"Want me to stay and cuddle?" Raleigh says, slipping Chuck's shirt over his head.

"Get the fuck out," Chuck says cheerfully as he disappears into his bathroom.

But it's Chuck who comes back after the fight in Hong Kong proper, barges right into Raleigh's room to shove him on the bed and press their lips together like he's proving a point. Raleigh finds out that if you yank on Chuck's hair just right, spank him a few times, you can get him to scream like a pornstar.

It's not the sex, though, that subdues the ragged parts of Raleigh's heart. It's not exactly hurting, of course. Chuck's insatiable, and he's pissed off that Striker didn't finish the job and his father is hurt, and when he claws at Raleigh's back it certainly does take his mind off the past. But that's not it.

Chuck is like Raleigh at twenty-one, boiled down and stripped to a crystal purity, brasher and more impatient by a mile, but still similar. What Raleigh wouldn't give to feel invincible and scared all at once again, to feel the weight of the world pressing down on your shoulders but know that you're a rockstar and you've got that same world in the palm of your hand. 

It's the way that Chuck finally breaks down after the second round to admit that he's harbored a crush on Raleigh since he was fifteen. It's the way they lay together for hours afterwards, even though Chuck keeps bitching that he's hot and sweaty, and Chuck finally admits that he's scared. It's the way that after all that fire's burnt down to embers and the storm has passed, that Chuck is just a normal kid. Behind all that bravado and show, he's still ticklish on the backs of his knees and demands to be kissed and runs his hands through Raleigh's hair while he talks absently about anything that comes to his mind.

Raleigh swears that he would have fallen in love with Chuck Hansen, if they'd been given enough time. 

There's not a lot of time between the kaiju alarm and the drop. Raleigh runs to find Chuck before he has to get in his drivesuit, kisses him, hard, until there are tears brimming in both of their eyes. Pentecost wouldn't get into a Jaeger again unless it meant something terrible was going to happen.

They hide behind a storage locker and Raleigh whispers some Shakespeare to Chuck, the lines from Romeo and Juliet: _When he shall die / Take him and cut him out in little stars / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night / And pay no worship to the garish sun._

"Mate," Chuck says, grinning a little through his tears, "that's the lamest shit anyone's ever said to me."

"Don't be an ass," Raleigh laughs. 

"Can't help it," Chuck says. 

"I'm going to miss you, you horrendous little shit," Raleigh says.

"Yeah," Chuck says, setting his jaw back to that arrogant clench. He bumps his forehead with Raleigh's. "Same here."

They kiss again and Raleigh leaves, every muscle in his body in a screaming match with his brain, urging him to run back. Kiss him again. Say goodbye properly. Legs like lead, acid in his veins, he goes to Mako, to Gipsy. 

Raleigh thought that wounds from Yancy would have been gone for good, or at least easier to live around, but losing Chuck just rips it right back open. It feels like someone took all his organs out and replaced them with ice. Even after they let him out of the medbay, he sits in his room with a bottle of vodka, a gift from the Kaidonoskys before they were smashed out of existence. It doesn't seem right, or fair, that so many people died in this attempt.

It's stupid, to be mad at the world at the sake of the loss of a twenty-one year old boy who got under Raleigh's skin anyway, riled him up and shook him to the core. But it's not just Chuck. It's Yancy. It's the kid Raleigh used to be. It's Stacker. It's Mako's parents. It's everyone and everything. There is no excuse for Raleigh's behavior now, lashing out at the poor techs who come to the door to try to take him back to the medbay for advanced physicals, punching walls and shredding blankets.

Mako comes to see him one night, wearing a threatening look that would have made a lesser man hide in the bathroom. As it is, Raleigh's stinking drunk and swearing while he tries to knit, and all her expression does is make him cry.

"You need to leave this room," she says, picking up the empty vodka bottle from the little table next to the bed.

"I don't . . ." Raleigh doesn't know how to end that sentence, because she's right. If he was a little younger, he would have fought her tooth and nail. But now he doesn't see much point in putting so much effort into what's bound to be a losing fight anyway. He just shakes his head.

"You're not the only one who lost someone that day," Mako chides. "Chuck was my best friend. He was Herc's son. And I lost my father."

Raleigh wants to crawl under a rock or fling himself into the sea. He's been selfish. He knew that from the start, which had only served to make him angrier. Now, looking at Mako and the expression on her face, stern but soft around the edges, all that bitterness seems to flicker out of existence. 

A strangled noise, half a laugh and half a sob, escapes his throat. Mako sits down next to him on the bed even though he probably smells like the sewer underneath a distillery, and wraps her arms around his neck. 

"He was a very good man," she says. Through the ghost drift, Raleigh sees her memory of his memory; hazy and distorted, he sees Yancy with that lopsided grin, Chuck with his copper-colored hair all askance. He doesn't know which one she's talking about, but it's a fair shot to say that she means both.

"Yeah," Raleigh says.

"Come on," she says, pressing her lips to his temple. "Get up, get showered. Go talk to Herc."

"What's there to say?" Raleigh asks.

Mako pushes the hair from his forehead, a sad smile on her face. "That's for you to decide." She leans in, whispers in his ear, "We come not to praise him, but to bury him."

All at once, Raleigh laughs until he nearly chokes on the tears flowing out of his eyes. 

Mako always knows, after all, just what to say.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi to me on [tumblr](http://isladelmar.tumblr.com).
> 
> Buy my book [here](http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/marissaesegreto).


End file.
